That was a tempting purchase I left behind this weekend. A glass from the 1982 Knoxville World's Fair, with the Sunsphere likely represented by that red ball in the top left? Nice. Thank you Simpsons for making me care about things I never would have cared about otherwise.

P.S. The Simpsons episode I'm talking about? Gotta be one of my top 5. For sure.

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If you didn't already know this, sometimes my girl Jenna send me some cool stuff. Here's a selection of items she sent me recently:

Michelangelo Nintendo Remix. Impressive. Tragic. Cute.

Larger paper mache animal and human heads. Weird stuff. Check out more crazy stuff from the whole catalog.

Shoes that make everyone the same height. I would not need those shoes, as I am 2 meters tall with regular shoes on. My license says 198cm, which always makes me sad. Why didn't I just say I was 200cm!? It sounds so much cooler.
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Here's a shoe that is definitely on my 'to get' list. Some day. Still kicking myself for a pair I found on sale in my size about 2 years ago and didn't pick up.

Such a classic. Love it. Gotta love A Time To Get for featuring it. Great taste over on that blog.
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Arial, it's a little bit bullshit. Well said.

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This is a great response to the presence of the Westboro Baptist Church.

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President Obama looks at awesome things. Well done! I gotta go with the Tardis as my favourite, just because the Tardis is awesome, but they're pretty much all great.

Had a pretty great weekend that consisted of 3 days of antique markets. Spent about 1 hour on Friday at the St. Jacob's antique market (with its big sale!) before it closed on Friday, went back on Saturday to finish up in about another 2 hours, then went to the southworks one in Cambridge with JT's parents. Amongst other things I scored the above stapler (the Apsco A9), one of these pretty sweet salt and pepper shakers, and we started assembling a pyrex bowl set. Spent a lot of time looking at sets other people had put together, but realized we could get something where every bowl is in better shape, and is exactly the colour we want if we buy it all piece by piece (if possibly a little more expensive). Jenna has a radar for spotting pyrex bowls, even if they're hidden behind like 8 other things and she has to move something big to get to them. Impressive. She spotted my stapler too, after I had walked right past it.

Solid weekend.
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Pretty badass shirt... Can only find a version for sale that I don't like nearly as much.
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Also, we've started papercrafting. More on that another time.

Special Delivery

While I haven't come back to post here in almost a month, I do keep returning to the above picture on Shorpy. Just a great image. Check it out real big. I can never say enough good about Shorpy.
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So I've been in what I call "cocoon mode," where things are just a little too hectic, so I pull back and avoid anything and everything that I don't HAVE to do. Of course, "have" does include spending time with family and friends, but you know, I gots my priorities.

For the quick Christmas re-cap, I had a great one, that included a hard fought for Wii (Jenna's parents both lined up separately before stores opened to pick one up), and this amazing piece by Timber that she managed to find and buy before I even knew it existed. You may know I love Timber, and I usually buy anything I see from him that I like as soon as I see it, so yeah, good score. Big surprises, awesome presents. The rest of it was great too, like having family over here for Christmas chili, getting to see my mom, and lots of time spent with The Suze and Big Ronnie T.

Now on to a tonne of links I've been meaning to share for awhile now...
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A beautiful Calgary manhole cover. From another favourite, of course, the Canadian Design Resource.
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Orla Kiely does some real pretty work, that keeps popping up in different places. The water bottle here is just cute.
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Luggage tags seem to be a huge colletibles market. This one might be my favourite I have ever seen around the old internet. The colours, the drawing style, the clean crisp typeface, the nice script, the shape, everything. But really, the illustration and colour especially. Perfect.
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Here's some interesting stuff from box vox, both related to chocolate, which I'm sure a lot of you, like me, have a lot of sitting around right now...
The Canadian $.05 chocolate bar revolt. In 1947 candy bar companies tried to raise the price of a chocolate bar from 5 cents to 8 cents, but Canadian kids were not having it. The Five Cent War is definitely a movie I wouldn't mind checking out.
And trust the Germans to make chocolate (more) evil: A "chocolate grenade," yes, a grenade disguised as a chocolate bar... Apparently there was more than one type of this in WWII. Evil.
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Finally, you gotta love Lincoln. Well, Obama rightfully does, and he and the democrats seem to be taking Lincoln away from the Republicans. Good call. I never even realized he was a Republican, but then, it was a whole different party back then, from what I hear.
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If you're not doing anything tonight, DJ Bearface! will be playing tracks all by his lonesome at the Jane Bond (that is, minus DJ88), so come by and say hi.

That there's a poster I just did for my newest "client." It's for their winter sale, but as far as I know it hasn't been printed yet, so consider this a sneak peek. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and I hope they ask me to do more in the future.
Overall I've been pretty happy with some of the stuff I've completed recently. I'll have to up it sometime so you all can see it.
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In the category of things I would like to own:
Something little. Every bathroom could use a robot! Actually, every room could use a robot...
Something big. Just beautiful. I can't decide which I like the most... Either the Twin, with its vintage british styling, or the MP, 'cause I've always loved vintage military gear (gotta be the green variation though, badass).
So, if you need a gift for me, big or small, there you go.
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The Neon Boneyard is a place I'd love to visit one day. It's pretty much the only thing I've heard of in Vegas that I would really like to go to. I mean, I'd like to see Vegas in some ways, but I think in the end I'd hate it. Except this place.
This place gets blogged about it alot (death by kerning, h&fj, for two, recently) but I've found myself talking about recently and realized that the people I know don't seem to have heard of it, and need to see its beauty.
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A great concept. I always find 2 litre bottles of soda taste flat like the day after you open them. If this bottle can fix that, I'd be awful happy!
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I guess you can file all of this section under 'Obama'. I wasn't planning on talking about him, but there's some pretty great stuff to share right now (not that there wasn't during the campaign, in fact, there was some amazing stuff, but you know...)
Loving this shirt. And, of course, the truth that it will soon come to represent. The 'new' lettering is pretty great if you ask me.
Newspaper front pages from the day after, from all over. Loving this contribution from Ottawa. The Toronto Sun ran the same tag line, but not as good of a picture.
So glad somebody did this! I was loving every piece of design that I saw come out of that campaign, and this compilation just proves that I was right in doing so. SO GOOD. Clean, concise, bold, confident, pretty as heck. Awesome.
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Another thing that's been making the blog rounds: Photoshop in real life. Pretty great.
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And now, for a touch of cute. Probably played out on the blogs by now too, but you know, I could use a nice peaceful touch of cute right now.